This invention relates generally to quality-of-service measurement in computer systems and more particularly to a system and method for continuously measuring quality of service in a federated application environment.
Federated application environments are characterized by independent computer systems in individual administrative domains that are loosely coupled by networks and cooperate to provide computing resources for a global application. The extent and capabilities of each administrative domain are usually determined by the network boundaries of each distinct supplier or service provider. Generally, cross-domain access by third parties is severely limited due in part to the lack of well-defined management interfaces and by security restrictions.
The inadequacy of present cross-domain access creates difficulties in identifying and diagnosing problems in distributed applications that must operate in a federated environment, such as Worldwide Web-based information servers and electronic commerce systems. The quality of service received by these applications depends upon many domain-dependent factors, including software subsystems, such as applications, operating system and middleware modules; hardware components, such as processors, clients, servers and disk subsystems; and networking infrastructures. However, cross-domain access restrictions preclude the impact of these factors from being adequately determined by an outsider.
A prior art technique for defining an efficient measurement infrastructure for a performance measurement system for heterogenous distributed environments, including federated environments, is disclosed in R. Friedrich et al., "Integration of Performance Measurement and Modeling for Open Distributed Processing," Int'l Fed. of Info. Proc., Brisbane, Australia (February 1995). The system as disclosed teaches a distributed management system architecture, but fails to define performance metrics or an approach to problem identification and diagnosis for federated environments.
Prior art network management systems are unable to identify and diagnose the causes of quality-of-service failures in federated environments. The primary reason is the unavailability of complete data for identifying and diagnosing problematic areas across administrative domain boundaries. Two management products capable of collecting restricted sets of data on network resource consumption, such as network links, routers and so forth, and on operating system resource consumption, including CPU, memory and disk usage, are the Open View Network Manager and Glance-Plus System Manager, respectively, both products of the Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, Calif. Moreover, neither of these technologies can provide correlated, end-to-end measurements of client-server or distributed applications and neither can access data collected in another administrative domain.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for identifying and diagnosing quality-of-service problems in distributed applications whose components reside in multiple administrative domains. There is a further need for a system and method for measuring quality of service in client-server and distributed applications operating in a federated application environment. There is also a need for a system and method for providing correlated quality-of-service information on local and remote application component performance spanning administrative domain boundaries.